June 3, 2009 by Matt Thomas
If you’ve been paying attention to the tech blogs over the past few days you’ll most probably have heard mention of the brand new application ‘Wave,’ that’s currently in development at Google. What you may still be a little fuzzy on however, is what Wave actually is. If this is the case then don’t worry you’re not alone, many people have the same issue, even Google.
The truth is that at this stage, nobody really knows the true extent of Wave and what it will be capable of yet. The makers recently let the experiment out of the lab by opening the API up to a group of carefully selected developers in the hope that they would come up with new functionality for the application that they hadn’t thought of. So basically, there’s no telling where the app will go from here.
Put simply, Wave is a new form of email, though this is probably too basic a description. It’s really more of a multipurpose communications platform that combines the features of email, with instant messaging and forums. The developers of wave were struck by the notion that email had remained, relatively unchanged for around forty years, after being invented sometime in the 60s, before social networks, before forums, before even the internet. Their mission, in their own words, was to try to create an email service that looked as if it had been invented in modern times.
It works like this, conversations, or ‘waves’ are hosted by the programme, parties exchange messages like normal though instead of several messages flying back and forward there is only one master conversation that people access. If you have a response to one particular part of the conversation you simply click it and write. Your response will be shown as relating only to that part of the conversation.
Okay, so the above features are useful but not exactly game changing. The really impressive stuff comes through the functionality of the programme. For starters, its real time which means you see each other’s keystrokes as you type. This means that email and Instant Messaging are no longer distinct entities, in fact Wave is better than IM as it eliminates the tedious ‘Joe is typing’ message that comes up as the other parties type IMs. Essentially Wave makes Instant Messages actually instant.
If you’re the kind of person that carefully crafts each and every email they send and checks religiously for spelling and syntax then the chances are the above is sounding less than ideal to you, but don’t worry it is possible to turn off the real time typing function. It is also possible to send private responses to just one person if you have something to say that is not relevant to the whole group.
Another element that’s impressing about Wave is the attachment capabilities. It’s basically a drag and drop set up. For example, all you have to do to attach several photos to your email is highlight and drag them over – it will then present those photos as thumbnails actually within the email. This means that Wave in addition to being a communications tool is also a perfectly decent personal online photo archive. All you’d need to do is create waves instead of albums.
As I said earlier, these initial core features are set to be expanded and changed over the coming months, though a strong consensus is emerging that Wave could be a hugely important invention for all of us. Even if it will take some getting used to.
Watch the incredibly long but very useful Google video on how wave will change our lives, below. 
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